Clinton Foundation Hires H-1B Guest Workers in Place of American Graduates

Getty10 Mar 2016

The Clinton family charities have outsourced many U.S. white-collar jobs to foreign college graduates instead of hiring American college graduates.

The outsourcing started in 2004 and it continues to this year. When asked if the foundation is still hiring foreign white-collar workers via the controversial H-1B visa program, Vena Cooper, one of the foundation’s personnel officers, responded “We do.”

The foundations declined to answer questions from Breitbart News, but available data shows they sought to hire up to 130 foreign graduates. That’s roughly half the number of 250 jobs outsourced by Disney last October, which has reignited political criticism of the middle-class outsourcing program.

The 130 foreign graduates sought by the Clinton’s foundations were and are not immigrants. Instead, they’re temporary “guest” workers who fill outsourced professional jobs for up to six years. The 130 requests were made over several years, and do not include requests from other other unrelated employers that also carry the Clinton name.

The Clintons’ foreign graduates have been hired via the H-1B visa program that also is used by Disney and U.S. corporations and universities to employ a population of roughly 650,000 young and cheap foreign professionals in business, design, healthcare, software, science, education, p.r. and media and pharmaceutical jobs. After their six years in the United States, most H-1Bs return home with the work-experience and connections that help them compete against U.S. professionals in the global marketplace.

The young foreign H-1B professionals are also used to push down average salaries earned by experienced and older American professionals. In turn, those salary cuts boost profit margins and company values on Wall Street.

The Clinton foundation’s foreign workers include some information-technology experts. But most are non-tech workers — comptrollers and budget analysts, health-care managers and directors, or foreign policy analysts. Most work of these workers are sent to jobs in New York, Boston and Washington D.C.

Here’s a description of some of the outsourced jobs, as detailed at VisaSquare.com.

Polls show this white-collar outsourcing is extremely unpopular. For example, a 2014 poll showed that“nearly 9 out of 10 [respondents] believe that U.S.-born workers and legal immigrants already here should get first preference for jobs.”

The family foundation’s board is headed by her husband, Bill Clinton, and also includes Hillary Clinton’s daughter, plus her long-time aide, Cheryl Mills. Hillary Clinton helped run the foundation prior to her appointment to run the Department of State in 2009. She formally rejoined the foundation’s board in 2013, but quit again in April 2015 to run for president.

The discovery of Clinton’s H-1B hires is a boon for her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, and for GOP frontrunner Donald Trump.

Trump is making opposition to the H-1B program a leading element in his campaign, despite his practice of hiring at least 1,000 blue-collar guest workers via the similar H-2B visa program. So far, Trump’s campaign-trail criticism of the H-1B program helps to explain his higher-than-expected support among college-grads and people with post-graduate degrees.

Sanders is also an opponent of the H-1B program. In 2013, for example, Sanders denounced the new guest-worker programs hidden inside the unpopular “comprehensive immigration reform” bill that was defeated in 2014.

“It does not make a lot of sense to me that we have an immigration reform bill which includes a massive increase in temporary guest worker programs that will allow large multinational corporations to import hundreds of thousands of temporary blue-collar and white-collar guest workers into this country from overseas,” Sanders said during the 2013 debate.

That stance is very popular among his supporters, including many debt-burdened college-graduates.

“I came out of school [in 2011] with a huge amount of debt… I had three part-time jobs….and I have a ton of student debt,” Nicholas Shoukas, a Sanders’ activist, told Breitbart News. He’s now working with developmentally disabled kids in Fredericksburg, Va., for $45,000 a year. He’s married, but doubts that he’ll be able to afford a house needed to raise a family.

Sanders repeated his anti-outsourcing argument in two February 2016 Democratic debates, even as he also called for legalization of the 11 million foreign migrants living in the United States.

“The guest-worker programs that were embedded in [the 2007 immigration bill that also failed] agreement were akin to slavery,” Sanders said Feb. 11. “Akin to slavery, where people came into this country to do guest work were abused, were exploited, and if they stood up for their rights, they’d be thrown out of this country.”

Sanders’ criticism was focused on the H-2B and H-2A programs that provide blue-collar guest-workers for the owners of resorts and hotels, restaurants, vineyards, landscaping, slaughterhouses and orchards. Those owners include Trump, who has hired hundreds of H-2B guest-workers for his resorts, including his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla.

Sanders is also hitting Clinton over her support of the H-1B program. In early March, Sanders’ team circulated this 2012 video of Clinton touting the outsourcing program — and also suggesting it is needed to offset a supposed lack of skilled American graduates — to an audience of young graduates in India, which provides most H-1B workers to U.S. companies. The relevant section starts at 51:30.

“It has been going on for many years now, and it is part of our economic relationship with India. Uh, and I think there are advantages with it that have certainly benefited many parts of our country, and there are disadvantages that go the need to improve the job skills of our own people and create a better economic environment,” she told the Indian audience.

The Clinton’s foundation is also supported by many companies that use H-1Bs, including Tata, Google and Microsoft. For example, Tata Consultancy Services is an Indian company that uses H-1Bs from India to win large contracts from large companies in the United States, typically for lower-skill software support and maintenance.

But Sanders’ campaign against the H-1B program, so far, has been crippled by his need to win Latino votes in the Democatic primaries. For example, he released a video championing his support for unskilled, welfare-dependent, illegal-immigrant Latino farm workers. Few voters — and even fewer reporters — can easily reconcile Sanders’ support for low-skill, low-productivity, welfare-dependent illegals with his simultaneous opposition to higher-skill, H-1B college-grad, outsourcing workers.

Each year, roughly 700,000 guest-workers are imported for a variety of short-term jobs.

That total includes roughly almost 200,000 blue-collar H-2A and H-2B guest-workers. In late 2015, GOP and Democratic leaders in Congress sharply quadrupled the inflow of H-2B guest-workers, adding up to 200,000 more guest-workers to the annual inflow this year.

The overall inflow of guest-workers includes roughly 110,000 new H-1B workers each year. Each worker can stay for six years or longer, so the annual inflow creates a resident population of 650,000 H-1Bs in the United States.

Many are employed in mid-skill information-technology jobs. But many H-1Bs are employed in non-tech jobs, such as those outsourced by the Clinton charities. For example, the nation’s universities and business partners employ roughly 100,000 H-1Bs, including roughly 21,754 professors, lecturers and instructors, 20,566 doctors, clinicians and therapists, 25,175 researchers, post-docs and biologists, plus 30,000 financial planners, p.r. experts, writers, editors, sports coaches, designers, accountants, economists, statisticians, lawyers, architects, computer experts and much else.

The huge scale of the H-1B program has been successfully hidden by business groups and by nearly all media outlets, many of which suggest the program only includes 65,000 workers. For example, Emma B. an aspiring biological scientist who canvassed for Bernie Sanders in February, told Breitbart News that she had never heard of the H-1B program. That’s remarkable because she’s now working on a stipend at the National Institutes of Health, which has hired hundreds of foreign biological scientists via the H-1B program, instead of Americans like her, over the last few years.

GOP voters, however, have already pushed two pro-H-1B presidential candidates — Jeb Bush and Sen. Lindsey Graham — out of the race. A third advocate for more H-1B visas, Sen. Marco Rubio, is slipping out of the race.

Graham, for example, lobbied agencies to deliver wage-cutting H-2B workers for a golf resort in his home state of South Carolina. He helped start the 2013 “comprehensive immigration reform” bill that would have created an amnesty and increased the flow of guest-workers to farms and slaughterhouses in his state, and H-1B professionals to every state. Bush built his 2016 economic platform on a promise that companies should be allowed to outsource many more jobs to imported foreign-graduates.

Rubio also has seen his campaign crippled by broad opposition to his 2013 immigration bill. That bill would have allowed companies — such as cruise-liners based in his home state — to hire many more foreign blue-collar workers, and it also allowed an unlimited hiring of foreigners who get college degrees at U.S. universities. The bill would also have amnestied all illegal immigrants, and would have doubled legal immigration to 2 million people per year. All told, Rubio’s bill would have ensured the arrival of one foreign worker each year for every one of the roughly 4 million Americans who turn 18 each year.

In contrast, the immigration platform offered by Trump promises to build a wall against illegal immigrants, and repatriate illegals now living in the United States. It also promises to raise wages paid to H-1B workers. If enacted, the H-1B pay-raise would largely end the financial incentive for U.S companies to hire foreign workers instead of American graduates.

On March 3, for example, Trump reiterated his anti-H-1B stance, saying in a statement that:

“The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: these are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay. I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse and ending outrageous practices such as those that occurred at Disney in Florida when Americans were forced to train their foreign replacements. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.”

Trump’s proposed H-1B reforms are extremely unpopular among business leaders because the H-1B program reduces their labor costs and increases their profits. “The entire Silicon Valley believes that the H-1B visa policy needs to be dramatically expanded,” one American CEO said in an interview with a newspaper in India. “The salaries here are going through the roof, because everybody is competing to hire from everybody else,” complained Bill Coleman, who runs Veritas, a data-storage firm.

So far in the 2016 campaign debates, none of the candidates — including Sanders or Clinton — have been pushed by supposed journalists to say how many immigrants and guest-workers should be allowed into the United State each year.

The main organization in the Clinton network is the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which has gone through a succession of names, including the William J. Clinton Foundation. The network also includes the Clinton Health Access Initiative, plus the Clinton Global Initiative, which is run by Bill Clinton.

There’s an annual cap of 85,000 new visas for requested H-1B workers. When the requests exceed the supply, the visas are distributed by lottery to employers, who then use the visas they win to import the H-1B workers for roughly six years.

But the Clinton foundation is exempt from the annual limit, which also does not apply to non-profits, universities or their corporate partners. That exemption means the foundation likely was able to get a H-1B worker for every approved request.

The Clinton Health Access Initiative apparently is not exempt from the annual cap, and so had to go through the lottery system. That means it was likely to get only 1 visa for every two requests, and was likely only able to hire half of its requested foreign graduates.

The MyVisaJobs.com site shows the networks requested up to 87 H-1B workers, although that number may include some duplication and exclude some requests. The VisaSquare.com site shows 130 requests, of which only two were denied.

That analysis suggests the network has been able to hire to hire roughly 100 foreign graduates in place of Americans.

The calculation of 130 applications are just for attempted hires by various part of the Clinton-run network over several years, and does not include any H-1B hires by unrelated business that share the Clinton name.

Despite repeated requests from Breitbart News, the Clinton network declined to state how many visa workers it hired, or why it chose to not hire Americans.

The VisaSquare site shows the data in a similar fashion.

Virgil Bierschwale, a U.S. tech-expert, has built a website showing which companies, universities and non-profit are trying to hire foreign graduates instead of Americans. Bierschwale’s website, for example, allows people to search by zip code, including the Clinton foundation’s zipcode.